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i've reported 1st post and one of the last OP's posts from this thread. for lame trolling attempts\misleading nature of messages\attention whoring on Suggestions Forum. but V-Man was not online for significant amount of time and Khronos_Webmaster generally processes only obvious spam\inappropriate content.

i suggest adding OP to Ignore List and\or unsubscribing this thread. that's what i do in case if someone on the forum goes full retard.

in that extension, glyphs from a font are realized as paths that the extension defines. In that extension, paths are drawn in essentially two passes: first a stencil pass to "compute" what portions of the screen are inside and outside the path and then a second path covering that area using the stencil test to actually draw to the framebuffer (and usually reset the stencil buffer).

Now, there are a large number of gotcha's in that extension with respect to font rendering:

For low-ish pixel density, hinting is a critical part of drawing glyphs. Hinting in true type fonts is via a "program" embedded in each glyph for a virtual machine. This hinting system is not a part of GL_NV_path_rendering and likely such a hinting system will never be reasonably do-able on GPU's.

You will need to render with anti-aliasing enabled to get reasonable output for typical letter sizes

There are more issues; font rendering is a very, very complicated beast. Indeed, drawing the glyphs is just one step. Then there is formatting (which includes kerning) and shaping (for script fonts). The complications do not stop there; character mapping and font merging is an issue and naturally requesting a font from the system is actually very platform specific and non-trivial. The NVIDIA extension has some of this built into it, but there are gaps and will drive those into font rendering up the wall.

There are also many, many font file formats with each file format offering different features and information of the font faces that it contains. It looks like the NVIDIA extension uses freetype2 much of the time and DirectWrite on newer MS-Window platforms (likely Vista or 7 and up).

I strongly suspect that the NVIDIA extension borders on heroic; it is a big extensions that does quite a bit of stuff and I strongly doubt it coming to core GL because GL is supposed to be platform independent and font query is very platform dependent... what about platforms that do not have fonts, eh?